Sometimes these speech preferences can pinpoint speakers to a fairly precise
area. People in South Carolina, for instance, say "vegetables," but in North
Carolina it's "vegetables." North Carolinians also give themselves away when
they say, "She's still in the bed" and "Let's do this one at the time." People in
Philadelphia don't say attitude, they say "attitude," and they don't have a down-
town, they have a center city, which is divided not into blocks but squares. In
one small area of eastern Virginia people tend to say about and house as
Canadians do, saying (roughly) "aboot" and "hoos." These linguistic pockets are
surprisingly numerous. In southern Utah, around St. George, there's a pocket
where people speak a peculiar dialect called—no one seems quite sure why—
Dixie, whose principal characteristics are the reversal of "ar" and "or" sounds, so
that a person from St. George doesn't park his car in a carport, but rather porks
his core in a corepart. The bright objects in the night sky are stores, while the
heroine of The Wizard of Oz is Darthy. When someone leaves a door open,
Dixie speakers don't say, "Were you born in a barn?" They say, "Were you barn
in a born?"
Add all these regional peculiarities together and it might be possible to trace any
one person with considerable precision. A sufficiently sophisticated computer
could probably place with reasonable accuracy, sometimes to within a few miles,almost any English-speaking person depending on how he pronounced the
following ten words: cot, caught, cart, bomb, balm, oil, house, horse, good, and
water. Just four of these words—bomb, balm, cot, and caught—could serve as
regional shibboleths for almost every American, according to the dialectologist
W. Nelson Francis.
When an American airline received anonymous telephone threats, the linguistics
authority William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania was able to identify
the caller as coming from within a seventy-five-mile radius of Boston. His
testimony helped to clear a man from greater New York accused of the crime.
Although the main dialect boundaries run from east to west, dividing America
into a kind of linguistic layer cake, some important speech differences in fact run
from north to south. People along the East Coast tend to pronounce words such
as foreign and horrible as "fahrun" and "harruble," whereas people further west,
whether from the North or South, tend to say 'Torun – (or "forn") and
"horruble." People along much of the eastern seaboard can distinguish between
words that are elsewhere in America strictly homonyms: horse and hoarse,
morning and mourning, for and four.
Kurath was aware that his four main speech divisions were not adequate. He
subdivided the four regions into eighteen further speech areas, and we should
remember that he was only dealing with the eastern states as far south as South
Carolina. If we were to project those divisions onto the rest of the country (and
bearing in mind that regional differences tend to diminish as we move west), we
could expect to find perhaps fifty or sixty subareas. But it may be that a really
thorough study would show that there are hundreds, even thousands, of regional
speech divisions.
We have really only just begun to look at the matter seriously.
The most famous large-scale study of American dialects, the Dictionary of
American Regional English (DARE), began work only in 1963, under the
direction of Frederic Cassidy. A hundred field-workers, armed with stacks of
questionnaires, were sent to 1,000 carefully selected communities to interview
2,777 informants. Each questionnaire contained 1,847 questions divided into
forty-one categories designed to tease out local or regional names for practically everything, from household utensils to feelings of affection to slang words for
passing gas. The researchers collected a phenomenal 2.5 million items. They
found more than 100,000 variations in terminology and pronunciation
throughout the country, including 79names for dragonfly, 130 names for oak trees, and 176 names for dust balls under the bed. (We just called them dust balls under the bed.) Something of the
colossal scale of the undertaking is indicated by the fact that nearly a century
elapsed between the book's being proposed and the publication of Volume 1 (A
to C) in 1985, which itself takes up 1,056 pages. Five volumes altogether are
planned.
It seems churlish to say it when so many years of dedicated work have gone into
DARE, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is not truly comprehensive.
In Iowa not one informant was from Des Moines, the state capital, and not one
was black. Yet the speech patterns and vocabulary of people raised in Des
Moines are quite distinct from those of people brought up in rural areas of the
state, and this division is almost certainly even more pronounced among black
people. However, a more exhaustive approach would not necessarily guarantee a
more accurate survey. Since 1931 diligent scholars have been collecting data for
the much more thorough Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, but
they are not finished yet. In 1939, the first volume, the Linguistic Atlas of New
England, was produced and the work has been proceeding westward ever since.
The problem is that by the time the westernmost states are dealt with more than
half a century will have elapsed and the early volumes will be largely out of
date.